Longtime friend of Duffy denies getting paid
As trial resumes, former CTV colleague says senator asked for ‘help with projects’
OTTAWA— Gerald Donohue, a retired local CTV employee and longtime friend of ex-broadcaster Mike Duffy’s, says the senator asked him to “help with some projects” and maybe he could “get me some money” to pay others who did some of the work, a court heard Thursday.
But Donohue denied he ever got paid personally for his work brainstorming ideas with Duffy, or for signing cheques to make payments for Duffy for other services that were issued on a Donohue family company. He said it would have put him at a “disadvantage with Revenue Canada.” Donohue was at the time receiving disability benefits and not entitled to earn other income.
After a three-month hiatus and a federal election, the fraud trial of the Conservative-appointed senator, resumed with an anti-climatic stutter.
Two minor witnesses were first called to bolster the Crown’s case that Duffy deliberately tried to skirt rules on filing travel expenses and cellphone plans; and the day’s star witness, Donohue, couldn’t complete his testimony due to an Ottawa storm that frazzled the video link to his home in a nearby suburb.
Donohue’s testimony, first expected in April and postponed repeatedly due to his ill health, was long overdue. Duffy’s lawyer Don Bayne had suggested at one point Donohue might not ever make it.
Yet when he finally testified via an oft-garbled link Donohue did not seem as enfeebled as court had been led to believe. He spoke clearly and told a tale of an odd friendship between one of the network’s biggest stars and a former broadcast technician with a Grade 10 education who moved up to become a local CTV human resources director.
Donohue said even after he took disability leave due to ill health, he and Duffy talked for hours about whatever came to Duffy’s mind, everything from whether to lease a car to his wife’s pension to causes that he might take up as a senator.
“He’d call me up and ask me what I thought of this idea or that idea,” testified Donohue.
“Mike asked me if I could help him with projects he could undertake, he said maybe he could get me some money,” Donohue told Justice Charles Vaillancourt, when asked whose idea it was to channel Senate money to Donohue’s wife’s company, Maple Ridge Media, later renamed Ottawa ICF.
The trial has already heard that Duffy issued about $65,000 in contracts to the company that the Crown alleges was used as a kind of slush fund for Duffy to pay for services including fitness training, makeup, photo framing and cell data plans that either weren’t reimbursable by the Senate or for which Duffy had already exceeded his office budget’s capacity.
Donohue said he wasn’t an officer of the company, did not have signing authority, and didn’t receive a salary, but he helped Duffy find contractors to do the work, went “hunting on the Internet” for information needed, and signed off on cheques issued from the Donohue-owned company to help his friend, paying little attention to some of the details. “I simply signed what was sent out.”
In response to Crown attorney Mark Holmes’ questions, Donohue had shaky recall of details he claimed to remember well, saying he always wrote Sen. Duffy’s name in the lefthand corner of cheques issued to cover Duffy’s makeup, photo framing, or for a volunteer in Duffy’s office, for example, when in fact he frequently didn’t.
Earlier, Gillian Rokosh, executive assistant to two other senators, testified to deny she trained Duffy’s office staff or suggested to them it was acceptable to have senators pre-sign blank travel expense forms, as a previous witness suggested. She said she never worked that way, and no executive assistants trained others in how to run the offices. She said training was available from the Senate’s administrative offices, and if there were questions that was where they were to turn.
James Cooke, head of telecom and IT services at the Senate, said the rules allowed senators to be covered for only seven data or voice plans on mobile devices, but that Duffy’s office asked to set up an additional device for a staffer, saying he would pay for it personally, as was required by Senate policy.
Bayne sought to shred the witnesses’ memories or relevance of their evidence to the core of the case. On the one hand, Bayne attacked their ability to recall events six or seven years ago when Duffy joined the Senate. On the other hand, he attacked the Senate rules and policies as vague, or as simply allowing Duffy to do things like charge Senate funds for extra cellphones.
Bayne argued that office staff needed proper equipment to do their work, and that there was room under the rules for it to come out of the senator’s research budget.